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Spectres of The Frame - After Image - Stephen Steyn

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Spectres of The Frame - After Image - Stephen Steyn

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stephen.steyn
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© © All Rights Reserved
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UNIT 20 – SPECTRES OF THE FRAME

Foreword: After Image


Stephen Steyn

A photograph is, tellingly, something that you take. We know, when we look at a photograph,
that the frame is not the end of the world. We know that the camera could turn and that reality
continues all the way around. The photographic image is only lifted out of (taken from) the
stream of infinitely dense narrative called reality, and is held aside. Yet, the selection does create a
hierarchy — that which is photographed is made separate from ‘everything else’ which remains
natural and subject to being forgotten. In that procedure, the density of the second category
‘everything else’ effectively erases its content; it is washed away downstream and the edge of the
frame does become the end of a world.

Through the photograph, a moment is made into an object; time becomes space and takes on
some of its characteristics. This leads to representation – making present again. When the
photograph is summoned, the past is made present by visual means and is remembered. But it is
not only the past that can be made present through images. Architecture has, for as long as
drawing has been one of its primary modes, been in the business of also bringing images into the
present from the future. Let’s call these images presentations. Presentations are often not crystal
clear; they are approximations, montages, assemblages, glimpses. Any resulting artefact is
invariably revealed to have been only somewhat like its presentations. Sometimes the future that
they described doesn’t appear at all and they are revealed to have been a ruse. An architectural
artefact has a quality all its own which is not shared by and between the many presentations
which at once predicted it and facilitated its coming into being. Walter Benjamin called this
quality an ‘aura’ – a breath, a spirit, or a ghost.

A spectre, as opposed to a ghost, looms. Spectres are imminent, foreboding; their consequences
are set in the future, even though they may originate in the past. Both ghosts and spectres are
appearances (apparitions) but spectres appear as a warning, rather than a call to attend to
unfinished business in the past. A spectre is haunting architecture — the spectre of the frame.
The frame is the point of view, it’s that visible which hides that it is not all that there is. It
delimits, and then stands in place of what it contains. The frames standing in the place of
architecture today are many and multiple: the edges of the page and screen, the building line, the
property line, the weather line and, perhaps most significantly, the building envelope. The
traditional presentations of architecture — buildings, models and drawings — do something
comparable to the technology of photography: they limit and define, they elevate and capture,
they order and they create place.
Film is what happens when you place one photograph after another in a sequence to create the
appearance of the re-animation of the stream of reality. In the cinematic arts, the power of
photography is multiplied, the effect of placing one image after another in quick succession, and
the addition of sound, means that professional writers, directors, cinematographers, etc.1 can
produce dreams on your behalf. And when those expertly-produced dreams are well beyond your
own capacity to dream, they become tools to educate (or hypnotise). Through great cinema, you
may learn to become a person, as it allows you (like literature, which preceded it) to live life after
life within the framed moments of a full length-feature.

With the addition of interactivity to cinema through video games, these art forms begin to touch
architecture. These art forms use the language of reality to construct appearances – to take
something out of the stream and hold it aside, but it keeps moving. It feels more like a branching
of the stream of reality; it is channelled rather than simply contained. The practice of architecture
does not achieve this living effect when it is practiced within the spectral frames of the building
envelope, property line, building line, page edge and screen edge. The cinematic effect of
multiple frames offers us a more prismatic, moving vision. It places the presentations of
architecture as close as it has ever been to the architecture it predicts.

Whether or not the building industry in South Africa will be able to adapt to the technological
advancements of cinematic arts remains to be seen. Architecture, it seems, will either have to pace
itself to wait for the slow-moving imagination of capital (as it is represented in our conservative
property and construction industries) or leave buildings behind. It is useful to remember though,
one way or another, that it is not really the end of the world. Each work of architecture also
places something into the stream, and though it may be forgotten, it alters the course ever so
slightly forever.

1
An enormous number of craftspeople work on every film and are credited, unlike the practice for building construction.

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